page_title: John Arundell (born 1576)
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: John Arundell (born 1576) / Career
caption_attribution_description: Pendennis Castle
context_page_description: John Arundell, Esquire, of Trerice in Cornwall, later given the epithet "Jack for the King", was a member of an ancient Cornish gentry family, who as a Royalist during the Civil War served King Charles I as Governor of Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, which in 1646 he retained in a heroic manner during a five-month long siege by Fairfax, during which his forces were reduced by hunger to eating their horses, and finally received an honourable surrender. He served twice as MP for the prestigious county seat of Cornwall, and for his family's pocket boroughs of Tregony and Mitchell and also for St Mawes. His family "of Trerice" should not be confused with the contemporary ancient and even more prominent Cornish family of Arundell "of Lanherne", six miles north of Trerice, "The Great Arundells", with which no certain shared origin has been found, but which shared the same armorials, the Arundell swallows.
context_section_description: In 1597 he was elected Member of Parliament for Mitchell, Cornwall, a pocket borough. He subsequently served as MP for the prestigious county seat of Cornwall in 1601 and 1621 and was Sheriff of Cornwall in 1607. He was elected MP for St Mawes in 1624 and for Tregony in 1628, and sat until 1629 when King Charles I decided to rule without parliament for eleven years. In April 1640 he was re-elected as MP for Tregony in the Short Parliament. He was not elected to the Long Parliament, unlike his two sons, Richard Arundell, elected for Lostwithiel and John Arundell for Bodmin. Following the outbreak of the Civil War he was a Royalist, remaining loyal to the King, and was present in 1643 at the Royalist victory at the Battle of Braddock Down in Cornwall. In about 1643 he was appointed governor of the royal Pendennis Castle in Cornwall, built by King Henry VIII to guard the entry to Falmouth Harbour. After the Royalist defeat at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, the Parliamentary army swept through the West Country, and Arundell defiantly refused the demand of General Fairfax to submit, and replied to him: 
  "I wonder you demand the castle without authority from His Majesty, which if I should render, I brand myself and my posterity with the indelible character of treason. And having taken less than two minutes resolution, I resolve that I will here bury myself before I deliver up this castle to such as fight against His Majesty, and that nothing you can threaten is formidable to me in respect of the loss of loyalty and conscience".
  He maintained a five month long siege in heroic circumstances, during which his garrison was reduced by hunger to eating their horses. Finally he surrendered in August 1646, making Pendennis Castle the last but one to have held out for the King. In 1651, following the establishment of the Commonwealth, he was fined £10,000 by the new government, a large sum later reduced to £2,000, and although his estates were sequestered and let, he was able to retrieve them on payment of a further sum.
caption: Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, in which as Governor John Arundell withstood a five-month siege by Parliamentary forces in 1646
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